Rosewood, imaginary of remoteness – Alba Cortés –
The exotic aroma of painting
Critical Text: Patricia Bueno
“The town of Holcomb is on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonely area that other Kansas people call ‘back there.'” (Truman Capote, opening lines of “In Cold Blood“).
To slide sensorially through your own thoughts is a tenuous – or even comfortable – way of seeking an ephemeral, inconsistent and unreal well-being, but which is as necessary as it is effective to maintain the desired balance we all seek, and which, in this exhibition, also seems to become the first suggestive thought when the bulk of the works that compose it are contemplated in their totality.
The painting carried out by Alba Cortés (Cáceres, 1991) for this project is especially visual and delicate at the same time. Full of nuances and intentionality, the artist presents in Rosewood, imaginary of remoteness a series of partial spatial visions whose presentation plays, on the one hand, with the points of view and the sizes to demonstrate that, in this case, it is she who indicates us in which form -and no other-, her landscapes should be seen, as if in some way, she were telling a spectator who wants to look something like: Yes, it is there, stand right there.
And this “right there” is close to the protagonist object, because the view offered is a fragment, a landscape reduced to a segment of vegetation that seems photographed, very contrasted, suggestive and suggestive, which speaks of a vision of exoticism decontextualized, which seems to be conceived with a clear intention to increase the deception that in itself, This is because in his painting, realism undergoes a process of metamorphosis, which is produced through the evolution of the concept of imitation, which he achieves by resorting to an intelligent appeal to the ancient aesthetic concept of mimesis, but with a clear intention of showing that the spirit of the times has changed.
His work emanates, therefore, sweetness and subjectivity, and invites us to dream of imagined places whose cerebral journey awakens sensory jolts such as a desert smell, a situational void, or a pleasant dry heat of the sunset -or sunrise- of a dreamed paradise, decontextualized, which seems to be seen through a sieved lens. In any case, these representations seem to refer us to an isolated place, perhaps to a non-place, because the light it presents does not allow the logical understanding of the passage of time, and that makes it a scenario of truce, between the distant and the unreal, as a continuity transmuted through a skillful gaze.
In short, a painting that emanates insight and denotes the mood of perfection that has always accompanied this artist who, with this project, invites us to contemplate and think about the controlled appreciation of a sublimated nature, with an intention to give beauty to naturalism itself or to the decadent, either through the presentation of its vigorous vegetation in its wild state, or through its enveloping and emphatic skies.
Patricia Bueno del Río
March, 2022
